What’s a Robbit?! Let’s find out in Jumping Flash!

Heloshi everyone! Your favourite coffee drinking Yoshi is back! Japanese games are always a treat to play or watch as not only can they deliver on good gameplay, focus more on the story or give us memorable characters but well, they can be rather odd or crazy at times.

Enter Jumping Flash, a quirky PS1 game developed by Exact and Ultra which combines FPS style gameplay with platforming. The plot of the game is simple yet a bit bonkers. Baron Aloha, the games big bad, has taken pieces out of Crater Planet so he can turn them into a private resort as well as hiding twelve jet pods that propel each of the games worlds. In response Universal City Hall dispatch Robbit, a mechanical rabbit (Come on! With a name like Robbit you expect some kind of rabbit!) to explore each world to retrieve each jet pod and ultimately stop Baron Aloha. Odd story aside, Jumping Flash turned out to be a good game that helped prove that the PS1 could stand ahead of its rivals in terms of graphical prowess.

While there are more graphical games out there now, this really helped show off the PlayStation in a graphical standpoint, which really helped when the Atari Jaguar, the Sega Saturn and the 3DO were lurking around the corner.

You control Robbit in first person and being a rabbit, can jump very high, three times in fact, which is really useful when you need to reach a far away platform or if you’re aiming to land on top of an enemy. Yep! Apart from being able to shoot and find firework pick-ups to fire at enemies and bosses, you can also stomp on them by simply jumping high enough to land on them, Mario style. Of course, I bet that some people are probably going to think “Wait, this games in first person, and there’s platforming, surely its impossible to control where you’re going right?” Well, thats been covered. When you press the jump button, the camera switches to show what’s below you, so not only are you able to see where to land but the handy convenience of Robbits shadow also helps you judge where to land on an enemy too. Another cool thing about this game is that it features Doom style corridor levels where shooting enemies takes precedence over jumping, which helps the game feel fresh in the process.

Jumping Flash was able to find a solution for platforming by shifting the camera when Robbit jumps. Having a visible shadow to guide you helps a lot too.

While the game is impressive on a technical standpoint and it is a fun game to play, it does have some problems as the difficulty tends to be too easy at times with some bosses being easy to defeat if you happen to have the right firework power up or just happen to jump at the right time and while the worlds are impressive, they don’t help the fact that you can breeze through them once you know where the jet pods are. Despite these niggles, Jumping Flash is a game thats worth checking out and as it was ported to PS Vita and PS3 via the Playstation Store, its never too late to give this game a go.